Seagate takes a terabyte of the storage apple

Seagate has announced the industry's first 7200rpm internal-fit 1TB capacity 2.5-inch hard drive, the Constellation 2.

The drive is made for server storage applications, including direct-attached, network-attached and SAN storage, and, as expected, has a 6Gbit/s interface, both SATA and SAS, and capacity points of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. There are 1.4 million hours between failures and a self-encrypting drive option.

The drive spins at 7,200rpm and has a 64MB cache. The areal density is 417Gbit/in2 and the z-height is 15mm. It looks to be 4-platter product.

Western Digital is sure to be close to announcing its own 1TB internal fit equivalent drive, with Toshiba also likely to build a similar product soon.

Dell expects to ship systems with this drive starting in late December, which probably means the to-be-acquired-by-Dell Compellent Storage Center arrays will ship them too.

Seagate says its new drive is an example of its new unified storage concept, as it embraces the "three Ss": small form factor, self-encryption, and SAS interface. The new drive is currently shipping to Seagate's OEMs. No pricing information was revealed. ®